Rifaiya-Iraq
The Rifa'iya in 20th century Iraq: The role of sufi genealogies and saint veneration in the political history of Iraq (Fritz Thyssen Stiftung)
Duration: 2013 - 2016
Project member: David Jordan
Publications:
Jordan, David. State and Sufism in Iraq: Building a „Moderate“ Islam under Saddam Husayn. London: Routledge 2021.
State and Sufism in Iraq is the first comprehensive study of the Iraqi Baʿth regime’s (r. 1968–2003) entanglement with Sufis and of Sunnī Sufi Islam in Iraq from the late Ottoman period until 2003 and beyond.
For far too long, the secular and authoritarian Baʿth regime has been reduced to the dictator Saddam Husayn and portrayed as antireligious. Its growing political employment of Islam during the 1990s, in turn, has been interpreted either as an abstract Baʿthist-nationalist Islam or as an ideological U-turn from secularism to a form of Islamism that ultimately contributed to the spread of Islamist terrorism after 2003. Broadening the narrow focus on Saddam Husayn, this book analyses other leading regime figures, their close entanglement with Sufis, and Baʿth religious politics of a state-sponsored revival of Sufi Islam and Iraq’s broad and distinct Sufi culture. It is the story of a secular regime’s search for "moderate" Islam in order to overcome the challenges of radical Islamism and sectarianism in Iraq.
The book’s two-pronged interdisciplinary approach that deals equally with politics and Sufi Islam in Iraq makes it a valuable contribution to scholars and students in Islamic and Middle Eastern Studies, Religious Anthropology and Sociology, Political Science, and International Relations.
Thomas Eich, „Abū l-Hudā al-Ṣayyādī and Ḥadīth“, in The Piety of Learning: Islamic Studies in Honor of Stefan Reichmuth, edited by Michael Kemper and Ralf Elger, Leiden 2017, 145-165.
This article analyzes three hadith collections published by the Rifaiya tariqa at the end of the 19th century. It is show that in these collections the isnads are of special interest since leading legitimation figures of the Rifaiya become nodal points of hadith transmission in them. Therefore they link two areas which existed separatly for a long time. Further, it is pointed at hadith material where the isnads go back to the Shi'i Imams. This supports my previous argument that the Rifaiya constituted a sort of social linkage between Sunnis and Shi'is around 1900.